


all of our heroes fading

by futuredescending



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Major Illness, spoilers for 7x01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-20 16:17:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15538104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: The thing is, Shiro is intimately familiar with pain. It is as natural to him as breathing and blinking. It’s a part of him. It is him. It’s literally in his DNA.





	1. Chapter 1

The thing is, Shiro is intimately familiar with pain. It is as natural to him as breathing and blinking. It’s a part of him. It is him. It’s literally in his DNA.

It starts when he’s fifteen and it is nothing like what it would become. Tingles really. Numbness in the tips of his fingers and toes, easy to ignore. A little discomfort is nothing.

(He studies harder, develops better discipline, and practices more than anyone in his year, all so he can see his father’s annually disappointed expression. _I expected better of you._ )

He even ignores the way his limbs occasionally start to fail him, like someone reaching out and snapping the nerves and connections in his arms and legs. One moment, he’ll be running, the ball in hand, the rival team chasing after him down the pitch and the next, the next….

 _I expected better of you_.

It’s only when it turns into actual pain—no, agony, so much, unrelenting, until he can’t sleep and he’s silently crying, clenching his jaw so he won’t scream—that he’s taken to a doctor.

The next few months are filled with pain, injections, and tests and tests and tests. His world shrinks down to the white walls of his hospital room or his bedroom when he can barely walk.

Until one day, they find their answer.

When they’re talking outside in the hall, the doctor and his parents, he slips off the exam table and quietly cracks open the door.

_—only get worse. Most people diagnosed at this age live for another ten years or so. Fifteen, if they take care of themselves._

And suddenly, his entire existence becomes a lot smaller.

 

_____

 

They had taken the Castle and Allura’s expedited travel abilities for granted. The universe is vast, infinite, ever-expanding, and previously, they could cross huge swaths of it with the mere opening of a wormhole. Only now—

“Does anyone have any two’s?” Hunk asks, eyeing the assembled group suspiciously from behind his fan of cards like someone is holding out on him.

Of course, seeing the unconvincingly innocent expression on Lance’s face, someone very well has.

“Lance,” is all Shiro has to say, adding just a little color to his tone and….

Lance sighs. “Ugh, fine!” He practically throws the three cards at Hunk. “We’ve been playing this game for hours. How much longer is it gonna take?”

“Aww,” Hunk says in mock concern, “is Little Lance is getting impatient? Has a certain Altean princess been ignoring you?”

“It’ll take as long as it takes,” Shiro says before Lance can respond. “Pidge, Coran, and Allura have been working nonstop to get the Lions back to working order—”

“Speaking of,” Lance interrupts, looking at Hunk accusingly, “Why aren’t you there helping them work faster?”

Hunk is having none it. “It’s called taking a break. You know, relaxing for a moment? Chilling? Something which you could use right about now, Mr Sexually Frustra—”

“Alright.” Shiro stands up, immediately silencing the others. Even the red in Lance’s increasingly flushed skin begins to recede, doubly so when Shiro reaches out and urges him up with a hand to his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Uh oh, Daddy’s angry,” Hunk stage whispers to Romelle.

“Go? Go where? Actually, I think I’m fine right here,” Lance babbles, but Shiro’s hand never wavers and Lance’s feet continue to march in the direction it indicates.

They don’t stop until the lush forest is spread out before them and the others are little more than small dots on the horizon. Lance glances around at their relative isolation and anxiously turns back to Shiro. “Is this where you start making me dig my own grave?”

Shiro, as is usually required, ignores him. “When I find myself frustrated by something, I've learned the best way of burning off excess energy is through physical exercise. Hence, why I think you and I should go for a run.”

“A run?” Lance’s face expresses the entirety of his feelings on the matter. “Do we have to?”

“It’ll clear your mind, hone your concentration, and improve your endurance during battle. Voltron can take a lot out of you.” With a little shove forward, Shiro starts them off at a light pace through the natural clearings in the forest, deftly avoiding rocks and raised tree roots. It’s a little unbalanced at first with just one arm. He dares not try for anything harder, which, fortunately seems more than enough for Lance. “And, as a side benefit, it tires you out enough to sleep through the night.”

“You act like that’s a problem for me,” Lance huffs, already breathing heavily. His limbs swing wildly and inefficiently about. “Why? Do you have trouble sleeping?”

Too late, Shiro realizes what he’s said. “I sometimes have a lot on my mind.” Delivered in the same even, reassuring tone as usual. He imagines his outward appearance as a calm and still pond. All his thoughts and feelings lurk deep beneath the surface, their churning causing nary a ripple above. Still waters. Still. “We can also talk about it, if you’d like.”

Lance shoots him a panicked look and laughs nervously. “Uh, nope. I’m good with running. Running’s great. I love running!”

It’s almost nice after that, Lance finally having to shut up to gulp down mouthfuls of oxygen. The world around them is painted in colors Shiro wouldn’t know how to identify, probably not even found on Earth. The flora blooms with abandon and infuses the air with lightly sweet scents. Some sort of avian like creatures trill out repeating melodies. He’s so intent on not listing to his left with the unbalanced weight of his arm that he almost misses it at first.

Tingles in his calves, tearing like fire throughout his thighs, his hips, up through his torso. Numbness, spreading fast, a tidal wave, and then….

“Shiro?”

He trips over the next tree root, tries to remain upright, but loses his battle with gravity, stumbling forward, trying to stretch out his lone arm to catch himself, but it won’t respond to his commands, while the ground rushes up to meet him and—

 

_____

 

“Shiro?”

Shiro looks up to find Keith standing before him in a way he would describe as uncharacteristically tentative. “Hi. I was going to rest in Black for a bit, but it wouldn’t respond to me.”

The statement, and all it implies, hangs suspended in the air.

Instead, Shiro leans against one of its giant metal paws on the side that hides himself away from the others like a wounded animal. He had tried, reviving memories of their connection, him and Black, grasping like a blind man for it, but there was nothing. Even the memories felt manufactured. Like they had never been. At least, not in this body. Maybe the connection had a physical component, which meant that him as he was now, a mere copy of his former self, could never have that connection with Black again.

“I heard what happened. Are you okay?” Keith asks, his brows furrowing in something that goes beyond mere concern. 

“I’m fine,” Shiro waves him off. “I lost my balance. I think I just pushed myself too hard in this body. I’m still trying to figure out the quirks. It’s been awhile since I even had one after all, and having just one arm really throws things….”

With every fumbling word that falls out of his mouth, Keith’s frown sinks deeper and guiltier and angrier. Shiro has to practically gnaw off his own tongue into silence. He doesn’t know what he is now. His body feels like it belongs to a stranger. Like an ill-fitting suit he’s just put on. Something that’s paper thin, still fraying at the edges. But he doesn’t tell Keith that.

Instead of focusing on the mess that is himself, Shiro turns all of his focus outward, but the only thing that finds itself at the center of his attention is Keith, and it’s….a lot. The Keith that stands before him now is at once so different and yet achingly familiar, and the dissonance created between the two impressions is like the outline of a fading dream.

There’s still the smoldering anger waiting to be fanned into a full, fiery blaze that Shiro first saw in him on the day he visited Keith’s classroom. Barely restrained, making his rangy, sullen body nearly vibrate with the need to release it, be it with angry, snarling words or in wildly flagrant disobedience.

Only now that energy is so much cooler, controlled. Keith is somehow impossibly older since the last time Shiro really had a chance to see him, and that new found maturity has honed Keith’s body into to a well-balanced blade. That wildfire anger now housed in steel.

Shiro glances away. His shoes and clothes are covered in the dried, now caked on, mud he’d fallen into, which at least had cushioned the blow and saved himself from a possible head injury.

Keith’s lips form a flat line, and Shiro can practically see the thoughts flicker across his face. Hesitance, worry, and then settling into resolve. He starts forward and lowers his body to the ground beside Shiro with enviable grace, close enough that their shoulders touch and the warmth of Keith’s body seeps into his. He gets cold so easily now. “I’m sorry for what happened. What I did to you. I cut off your arm. And I failed to see what was happening before it was too—”

“No, Keith,” Shiro shakes his head, seeing the path of Keith’s self-destructive thoughts and wanting to put a stop to them in their tracks. “You have nothing to apologize for. I would have killed you. You did what you had to do, and you saved me. You came back and saved me.” _You always come back for me_.

“Still,” Keith says. “You no longer have your arm. It caused you to get hurt today. And it could have been worse.”

Subconsciously, both Shiro and Keith look down at the absent space where his cybernetic arm used to exist. There’s just a closed off port now below his shoulder. It’s a strange sensation. He feels like his arm is still there, but his eyes are telling him a different story. Before, whenever he actively leveraged its more Galran abilities, it was searingly painful, but pain was something he was used to, just another aspect of his life to be dealt with.

“To be honest,” Shiro admits, “It’s kind of a relief to have it gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was always a visible reminder of what had been done to me and my connection to our enemies. I could never fully trust it. Pidge told me about the safeguards she created that shut it down when he—when I—fought. I clearly wasn’t the only one who was worried about what could happen.”

Except now it wasn’t just his arm or his connection to Zarkon through the Black Lion that he couldn’t trust. Now, his entire body had been crafted by the enemy, his mind formed and molded to easily bend to Haggar’s command. Just because his true spirit was now housed in this body didn’t mean there wasn't a chance he was still susceptible to her control. He could barely think about it without succumbing to that lurking darkness that sometimes crowded at the edges of his vision.

There was the slightest tell in Keith’s expression, the twitch of a brow, that betrayed his uncertainty. That he realized the same things Shiro did and just as quickly shoved them back down into a box full of other nameless, uncomfortable things.

But then Keith meets his eyes. They glint brightly with determination, in a color that, Shiro realizes, isn’t quite human, but reminds him of the liminality between the brightest and hottest part of a flame. “I won’t let them use you again.”

The simplicity of that statement cuts through him as sharp as his blade would have. Shiro finds himself breathing in sharply and unable to release it.

When he first met Keith, he knew a boy. A very angry, very talented, and very lonely boy. And now Keith is...Keith is every ounce the man Shiro thought he could one day become. There’s strength and compassion and an utter competency that could conquer the entire universe if he put his mind to it.

If Keith says he’ll do it, he will. And there would be nothing that could stop him.

“I know.” For the first time since he woke up in this second chance at life, Shiro feels safe.

 

_____

 

It takes a few more days and copious amounts of Pidge’s overexcited, rambling explanations of what she’s done with what Lance keeps calling _electric sparkles_ before the Lions are back in fighting and flying form, and then they, and all their worldly possessions, are on a course set for home.

The Lions can fly faster than most ships, but it’s still going to take months.

Between their extra cargo and passengers, they’re two to a Lion. Krolia gives Shiro an inscrutable look and says she’ll ride with Pidge and her merry menagerie of creatures.

“Besides,” she tells Keith with a smile so loving, it makes Shiro’s heart ache just a little, “You’ve spent a long time with just me for company. I think you could use a break.”

It’s only natural for Shiro to fly with Keith after that (the alternative is to ride along with Lance and his cow and while Shiro likes to think he’s a patient man, he has his limits), even if an uneasy feeling falls over him the moment he steps onto the Black Lion. At first, he can’t understand why. Everything looks the same as he left it. It’s only when Keith settles into the pilot’s seat that it hits him.

He _died_ here.

Once the initial terror clawing at his throat passes, he’s left with a single thought: it should mean something to have resided within the Black Lion for so long afterwards, but there’s nothing.

He no longer has that intimate connection to the Black Lion. The warmth he felt in his soul when he touched the controls, when he looked through its eyes and understood its past, gone.

Empty. He feels nothing.

It hurts worse than he would have expected. Like someone has struck a fist through his chest and ripped out something vital. For several moments while Keith speaks with the others and readies them all to launch, Shiro can’t breathe.

Darkness begins to seep into his eyes. Everything tunnels. Keith’s voice moves further and further away.

And then, it’s Zarkon who fills his vision, rushing towards him, _through_ him, a look of pure fury stretched across his ravaged features, reaching out to tear him apart—

“Shiro, are you okay?”

A hand touches his knee, an anchor snapping him back to the here and now.

When the world comes back into sharp relief, Keith is out of his seat, crouched down before him, almost succeeding in hiding his fear.

His heart is still beating loud in his ears. His skin feels sticky with sweat. Shiro tries to give him a reassuring smile. “Yeah. Sorry. I just got a little dizzy.”

“Maybe Allura should have a—”

“Keith. I’m fine. We need to go.”

The only thing that probably keeps Keith from insisting is that everyone else is waiting on them, and the undercurrent of slowly mounting anticipation to finally be on the move again is too much to bear for another delay.

 

_____

 

The initial reason Shiro joined the Galaxy Garrison wasn’t particularly a unique one: he likes space. He wanted to be a space traveler since he was a little boy.

The reason why he persisted in taking the Kerberos Mission against the doctor’s and his own S.O.’s wishes was something more complicated. He doesn’t think he fully understands it himself. Adam certainly hadn’t. And if Shiro hadn’t been driven by that inexplicable and unrelenting drive, the absolute and utter _need_ to go through with this mission, he would have listened to him. He would have stayed.

Maybe they would have had a happy, if brief, marriage. A life filled with love and appreciation for the time one had is not a bad end. It’s a better one than many get. Maybe if Shiro had chosen that path, he wouldn’t even have regretted it.

He’ll never know now though.

There are plenty of things to regret from the past two years, but as he gazes out at the panorama of stars and cosmic swirls of galaxies over Keith’s shoulder, this isn’t one of them. “I’ll never regret this view.” Nor the peace he feels in the endless expanse of it, nor the quiet.

Keith’s eyes slide over to him, brow quirked in a mixture of amusement and bewilderment. “What, space? You mean, you haven’t seen more than enough of it by now?”

“We’ve been going hard and fast ever since we left Earth,” Shiro says. “Between training for Voltron, fighting against the Galra Empire, and wormholing from place to place without much of a break in between...it’s hard to think of a time when we’ve just sat back and looked out at what was around us.” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Keith turn back to the view, brow now furrowed in the way it does when he’s trying hard to understand something. It forces Shiro to bite back a smile. “All I ever wanted to do was be out here. I would have given up anything.”

And he had ended up giving up everything. It had to be for something.

The beat of hesitation is enough for Shiro to know that Keith might be having similar thoughts. “If you knew how things would turn out, would you have still gone on the Kerberos Mission?”

“I...I don’t know,” Shiro says, caught off guard, the serene vein he wanted to stay immersed within now faltering. Then: “Yes. Yes, I like to think so. We’ve done so much good with Voltron. We’ve saved lives. We’re taking down the Galra Empire. It’s worth the pain.” Pain is just another aspect of life to deal with, he automatically tells himself.

“I don’t know if I could say the same,” Keith says, almost too quietly for Shiro to hear. He won’t meet Shiro’s eyes.

“Not even to be reunited with your mother? Or to finally learn the truth about your heritage?”

“I think I would have at least tried to stop you from going to Kerberos.”

The admission rocks the very foundation Shiro thought was so solid beneath his feet. His fingers clutch at the back of the pilot’s chair until his knuckles turn white and the ensuing numbness tingles up the tendons and bone. “Not even if it meant eventually saving the universe?”

“Not if it could save you from everything that would happen.” When Keith finally looks at him, it’s with something Shiro can’t quite put a name to, only that it makes him feel like he’s gone full throttle over a cliff and he doesn’t know how to navigate the forces rushing over him.

He just knows that he doesn’t want to crash and burn, nor sap the momentum away from...from whatever this is.

 

_____

 

One time when Keith is asleep, curled up next to the warmth of his ridiculously large cosmic wolf’s body and using its thick fur as both a pillow and blanket, Shiro makes his way to Black’s cockpit and sits in the pilot’s chair.

He reaches out and lightly rests his hand on the lefthand controls, not daring to put any more weight behind it.

He closes his eyes. He _tries_ to feel Black again.

“Please,” he says quietly, “We knew each other once. You kept me safe countless times. You preserved my essence. Do you remember me at all?”

He waits. The silence carries on. He feels nothing but cold metal and the even colder vacuum of space beyond it, no more lifeforce or energy than any other vehicle he’d driven on Earth. A dead thing really, to him.

Or maybe, he’s the one who’s dead. Or should be.

 

_____

 

“I spy with my little eye...something...red,” Hunk says over the comms.

As he flexes his fingers by his sides to get the circulation running back through them, Shiro watches Keith barely restrain an eye roll and say, perfectly deadpan, “Let me guess: the Red Lion?”

“Hey, how’d you know?” Shiro can’t tell whether or not Hunk’s kidding. “Okay, lemme try another one then. I spy with my little eye, something...green.”

“This game is dumb and boring, and it was dumb and boring when we started playing it over two hours ago,” Lance groans. “Traveling through space takes forever when you can’t at least swim in a pool. Anyone got any music?”

“As a matter of fact,” Coran says with far too much delight to mean anything good, “I managed to save some traditional Altean folk songs from the Castle’s database. I can play them now if you—”

“No!” comes the alarmed chorus from the other Lions. 

Keith mutes his comms with a little too much force. They were all admittedly getting a little restless. But before Shiro can rib him a little about his impatience, Keith turns to him and they exchange a mutually exasperated look, but it's lined with fondness there as well for all their team members, even the more...challenging ones.

“You’re a good leader, Keith,” Shiro suddenly feels the need to say. “I’ve been watching the way you now work with the others. I’ve felt it through Black. They look to you for guidance without a second thought, and you work well with them in return.”

Keith doesn’t speak at first, but when he does, it’s not altogether happy. “You said something similar. Before. The other you, the...him. I should have known it wasn’t you.”

Shiro has his memories now. The other him. They feel like they’re his own. He nearly blew up his friends. He had wanted to kill Keith. He tried to. It’s horrifying if he lets himself dwell on it for too long. “In just about every respect, it was me. He said and did the same things that I would have.”

“But it wasn’t you,” Keith insists. “There were signs, and I didn’t see them. I _left_ when you came back!”

Shiro lays a hand on his shoulder. As always, the touch leeches the tension from Keith’s spine. “Haggar’s plan wouldn’t have worked so well if he wasn’t so convincing. Allura was fooled. Black accepted me back. I even managed to make direct contact with Lance and he didn’t know it was me.”

“Yeah, well, it’s _Lance_.” Despite the seriousness of the situation, Keith can’t help but smirk.

“The point is, this wasn’t your fault or anyone else’s,” Shiro says. “It happened, and we have to move on from it.” 

“I don’t know how you can do it, be so accepting of everything you’ve gone through.” Keith shakes his head. “If I were in your place, I’d have broken long before now.”

Shiro can’t help but smile mirthlessly. “I like to think I had a lot of practice in overcoming challenges.”

Keith looks back at Shiro like he had just punched him in the gut. “But...everything’s okay now, isn’t it? What you had, Shiro, from before. You seem okay now. I mean...this isn’t even you anymore—I mean, this isn’t your body. No, wait, I meant….”

Shiro steadily refuses to flinch, but he’s adept at refusing to give in to his first reactions. “I know what you meant. It’s fine.” He means it too, because Keith will take that burden onto his shoulders if he could. “And I’m fine too. Like you say, this isn’t that body.”

Keith slips out from beneath his hand to stand up, and though he still has to look up to meet Shiro’s eyes, right here, right now, Shiro is stupefied to realize he’s nervous. When Keith reaches out with his hand, he freezes, breath caught in his chest, as Keith’s fingers pinch a tendril of lamentably white hair. Lance won’t stop calling him an old man. More and more these days, Shiro feels it.

But Keith’s expression is far from anything resembling disgust or pity or even guilt. It’s tender and carries with it the weight of their history. “Maybe not your original body, but it’s _you_. It could only be you.”

Shiro almost leans into his hand to absorb more of its caress. He stops himself at the last moment.


	2. Chapter 2

When they finally reach Earth, there’s no sense of homecoming. No feeling of warmth or relief. Shiro doesn’t feel the same utter joy he can hear in Lance’s excited whoop when Earth appears on their viewscreens or the anticipation in Hunk’s as he regales Romelle with a list of Earth’s best cuisines.

Earth, to him, is just another planet in the universe. Another way station in another mission. Maybe the idea of home belongs to another him, the one who is gone.

“I thought,” Keith starts to say, but then stops just as abruptly.

Shiro looks over at him. “What?”

“I thought I’d feel something more. Relief, maybe.”

“Well, we discovered that not only aliens existed, but an entire alien empire had taken over multiple systems across the universe.” Shiro tries to shrug nonchalantly, but he’s never been very good at being glib.”Maybe the idea of home feels a lot more quaint.”

“It makes sense, I guess. Half my ancestry isn’t even a part of this world. No wonder why nothing ever felt like home.”

It’s only when they’re breaking atmosphere does it occurs to Shiro that out of them all, only he cannot justify leaving Earth again. He’s no longer a Paladin of Voltron. Keith has shown himself to be a strong and capable leader. He only has one arm, one plain human arm with one clumsy non-dominant hand. It has no special power or strength, nor the ability to interface with Galran tech.

He may even be a liability because of whatever Haggar did to him. If Pidge had been prepared for the eventuality before, she would be doubly so going forward. They all would, no matter how many assurances they gave him now. Trust, once broken, would be difficult to regain, and like a shattered vase that's been glued back together, the cracks would always remain. He would never fully have it again.

There’s no reason to stay on with the team. He doesn't possess anything that could provide value.

The plummeting feeling in his stomach isn’t caused by the descent to Earth.

It begins in his core and spreads out through his body like the epicenter of an earthquake. Between the gravitational forces that jostle the ship and his own unsteady feet, Shiro falls to his knees hard, barely managing to catch himself on Keith’s chair to keep from face planting onto the floor. Jolted from his piloting, Keith glances back at him with worry. “Shiro?”

“Sorry, I lost my footing.” Another reason why he no longer belongs on the team: he can’t even maintain proper balance anymore. How can he go on any missions or fight? “This is going to take some getting used to.”

Keith looks pained for a moment, but at least he doesn’t launch into a string of guilt-driven and self-hating remarks again. Instead, he seems committed to determination, which is a far better look on him, and it reminds Shiro again of how far Keith has come.

“When we land,” Keith says, turning back to the screen where the blue, brown, green, and white smears of Earth are swiftly taking up increasing amounts of real estate, “we’ll get you a new arm.”

 

_____

 

Upon reflection, they should have been glad the Galaxy Garrison didn’t try to blow them out of the sky with their unexpected arrival. But Dr. Holt must have told the Garrison about them, because the reception they get is only half-suspicious, half-wonder, especially when the less human half of their contingent emerges. Funnily enough, it’s the cow that has them all visibly disturbed.

After that, it’s a lot of medical examinations, tests, and interrogations disguised as debriefs. Shiro struggles to recount the number of alien races he’s met. Their capabilities and weakness. Whether they were allies or enemies. The technology he’s seen and used. What he’s been through. The mention of being a clone of himself takes a full day to explain to their satisfaction.

For him, at least, it ends up taking nearly a week.

The doctors look at his shoulder port and puzzle over the shredded connections. Even though the arm is gone, what’s left is still constructed from far more sophisticated technology than anything they’ve ever seen. There are connections that run from the port straight to his spinal cord, mimicking real nerves.

“I’m afraid nothing we have will compare to what you were used to,” the doctor tells him, “and it may not be compatible with the remaining technology in your body, but we have some great engineers here and we’ll do our best, especially if we can talk to your Galran.”

“I know, Doc. I have faith in the team here,” Shiro says.

The doctor, an older man with a gentle, careworn face, gives him a smile, but it’s gone too soon, replaced by a foreboding hesitance. “There is something I wanted to talk to you about. Some things that came up on our tests.”

Somehow, none of this feels like a surprise, but he can’t help fighting for another moment of happy ignorance anyway. “This isn’t my old body.”

“No, but it was cloned from your genes, and your muscular dystrophy is genetic.”

Shiro presses his lips together and looks away. Apparently when Haggar was creating the multitude clone versions of him, she didn’t see the need to fix their inherent flaws. Then again, why bother when there were so many backups, and ultimately, he was disposable anyway? Shiro looks down at his remaining hand as if he could see through the skin and into the very flesh that consistently failed him. “I’ve been noticing symptoms in the past few weeks. They’ve been coming on a lot faster and harder than usual. The tingling. The numbness. I’ve been...losing function intermittently in my legs.”

“Well, from what I gather of your adventures, it sounds like your body has been exposed to extreme amounts of stress, to say nothing of other alien elements. Any or all of these factors may have significantly advanced the disease.”

Shiro closes his eyes. “So it turns out I was brought back to life only to end up dying faster than I should be. How long do I have?”

“It’s hard to say. Before you went to Kerberos, I would have said you had five or so years to continue living with relatively little impairment. But given all you’ve experienced and your description of the rapid progression of symptoms, I would say it’s much less than that. When you start to experience respiratory or cardiac distress is when we’ll know we’re in the late stages. But Shiro,” the doctor says, and his change in tone makes Shiro look up and regard him with his full attention, “the important thing here now is to reduce the amount of stress in your life in order to preserve the quality of the remaining time you have.”

It’s a kinder way of saying that he’s grounded. No more space, no more team, no more purpose.

For the rest of his life.

 

_____

 

“We got the plans to rebuild the Castle, or, well, something at least close to one. We’ve warned Earth about possible alien invaders and given them suggestions for improving their defenses. We’ve hooked the Garrison up with the rest of the coalition. Not bad for an expellee, three AWOL cadets, a man whose legal status is still KIA, and a handful of pointy eared aliens. Time on Earth well spent,” Keith says in one breath as soon as Shiro opens the door to his temporary quarters on the base. He has some of his old swagger back, leaning against the door frame and giving Shiro an almost cocky grin. It’s been a long time since Shiro’s seen him this carefree. “I think our next steps are to head back out and start getting all the materials we need to rebuild our ship. The Olkari even agreed to help us.”

Belatedly, Shiro steps back to allow Keith to enter. “That’s great. It sounds like you’ve been busy. I can only imagine the look on Commander Iverson’s face when he saw you.”

“I had Pidge take several pictures for posterity.” Keith grins as he follows him into the room. “I take it you’ve been busy too. I haven’t seen you around that much. Please tell me they aren’t sticking you with needles like a lab rat.”

“Only a few here and there when my back is turned,” Shiro jokes. “Actually, I’ve been...taking some time to relax and re-calibrate. The doctors have me on a light activity, stress-free regimen for awhile while they drive your mother crazy with questions for my arm.”

“I’ve never seen someone be so helpful while looking like she wants to sever their heads from their bodies.” Keith’s tone is one of approval and awe before his expression turns teasing. “Nice of you to get a break while the rest of us keep at it. Slowing down, old man?”

“Hey now, if you keep spending time in warped pockets of space, I won’t be the only old man around here.”

If anything, Keith looks delighted by the inclusion. “It’s good to have company.”

“Especially when the company is good,” Shiro agrees.

“Seriously, though, it hasn’t been as bad here as I was expecting. It’s even kind of nice,” Keith admits, rubbing the back of his neck. “But...I’m ready to go. When everyone else is, of course.”

If Keith hadn’t said the words out loud, his body would have given him away. Restlessness colors every long, sleek line of it. A battle readiness and assurance that hadn’t previously existed.

There’s something about him that defies his surroundings. He’s a creature of the universe now, not Earth, not anymore.

The reminder of it hurts.

Slowly, Shiro lowers himself on the edge of the couch, and Keith follows suit, taking up the place beside him. “About that.”

“What is it?” Like Keith can already sense something’s wrong.

“I won’t be coming with you.”

For several stunned seconds, there’s silence. Shiro sneaks a glance out of the corner of his eye, but can’t bear to face Keith fully.

“I don’t understand,” is what Keith finally settles on. “You’re part of the team.”

“Am I?” Shiro counters, and there’s an unexpected sharpness to his tone that clearly takes Keith aback. “I can’t pilot a Lion. I can barely stay upright, much less fight. And I could still be another ticking time bomb waiting for Haggar to get her claws back into me. There’s no place on the team for me anymore.”

Keith jumps to his feet. “What are you talking about? Of course there is! You’re our leader!”

“No, Keith,” Shiro says softly, “You’re their leader.”

The seeming simplicity of the statement, an irrefutable fact now, leaves Keith without an immediate reply. Shiro takes the opportunity to stand, because a proper occasion of passing the mantle calls for it. “You’re ready for it now, and I can’t think of a better person to lead the team. There’s no one else in the entire universe that I trust more.”

“Shiro….” Keith tries to weakly protest, but he must sense the finality, because no more arguments emerge. But unhappiness lingers in his eyes. Worry is there too, along with the usual refrain of guilt.

Shiro can’t help reaching out again, reaffirming through touch. It’s grounding for them both. Keith is real. He’s the here and now. Every second with him is precious, Shiro realizes. “Thank you for taking care of them. Thank you for taking care of me.”

“How could I not?” The smile Keith gives him feels tenuous, as delicate as a butterfly wing, and yet it’s holding back a torrent of unspoken words.

But it’s okay. Shiro already knows them well. 

 

_____

 

When he was first diagnosed, his doctors told him that staying active was one of the best ways to manage his illness. Not cure it, because that could never happen, but at least slow down the war’s eventual, if inevitable, conclusion.

So Shiro did more than keep active. He excelled. If he kept his body in peak physical condition, he’d have that much more of a buffer between its inevitable decay. Morning runs followed by weights at the gym followed by combat sparring followed by yoga followed by not eating an ounce of sugar, getting eight hours of sleep a night, meditation, self-help books, classes, motivational speeches, inspirational quotes, extra practice in the simulator, ad nauseam. Anything to beat time.

Now that he’s on the other side of that long and costly battle, there’s a small, reluctant part of him that wonders why he ever bothered. Why he bothers even now with doctor recommended light morning jogs through the base before the sun even rises to minimize the number of people he’d run into.

But instead of running into his fellow pilots or commanding officers, it’s Allura poised gracefully for him towards the end of his route, and she doesn’t even pretend that she isn’t patiently waiting for him.

He slows down and glances at the first rays of dawn just beginning to warm the sky. “You’re an early riser here, Princess.”

“I'm afraid after having been out in space for so long, my body doesn't quite recognize your days and nights here yet,” Allura says. “But I am enjoying your planet and its people. What they may lack in advanced technology, they more than make up for it in hearts and minds.”

“We’re frequently underestimated, it’s true, but that does have its advantages as well.”

“That it does,” Allura says before shifting slightly in her stance.

Shiro braces himself for what she has come to say.

“Keith told me you’re going to stay here. I can understand your reasons, Shiro, but not the assumptions behind them,” she begins gently. “You must know you’ll always have a place with us. Your contributions have been invaluable. Without your strategy and tactics, we would never have made it this far.”

“That was a lifetime ago,” he says, finding a bittersweet sort of amusement at the words. “Things have changed. And Keith is more than ready to take my place. I don’t have a doubt in the universe that you’ll succeed, but it’s not going to be with me.”

It’s this utmost faith in his convictions that allows him to return her piercing, all-too-knowing gaze without flinching. And, as if sensing the very immutable nature of his choice, Allura bows her head. “Very well then. I will respect your decision. It’s rather funny, in a way. Part of me feared the temptation of being home again would result in the loss of some or all of our paladins. It would be all too understandable. If Altea still existed….”

She falls silent, remembering, gaze falling back in time to some distant place with a familiar sadness. Longing could be a powerful force. She knew that better than most.

“Fortunately,” Shiro says, drawing her back to the present. “Voltron will continue the fight, and the coalition has a new ally here in Earth. And while I’m here, I’ll do everything in my power to support you. Maybe that’s where I can be of most help for now.” For whatever time he has left. “But I also want to thank you as well, Allura, for giving me a second chance at life, even after everything I did.”

“I don’t blame you for any of it, Shiro,” Allura says, smiling a little. “Do you blame me for almost flying us into a dying star? Or giving Lotor the means to have nearly killed us all?”

Shiro frowns. “No, of course not.”

“Then you need to stop blaming yourself for the things you could not control,” she says pointedly.

Shiro gives her a rueful smile. “Point taken.”

The glance they share is commiserating, though. They both know it’s easier said than done.

Allura sighs and steps forward, reaching out to lay a gentle hand on his forearm. “There’s also another reason I want you to come with us. It’s simply that...we’ll miss you. I lost my family, Shiro, but I like to think I’ve been fortunate enough to have found a second one, and you are a part of it.”

The words unexpectedly disarm him. He thinks back to his parents, how remote in their affections and overbearing in their expectations they had been. He never could make them proud, and the shadow of their disappointment still haunts him. When he saw Keith driving away with his stolen car, he was determined to never be like them.

But what he hadn’t expected in all of this—forming Voltron, fighting Zarkon and the Galra Empire—was to find his second family as well.

“I’ll miss you too,” Shiro says, his voice growing embarrassingly thick. “Thank you for believing in me.”

She draws him into an embrace, and she must be doing something with her physical mass again, because she easily bears his weight when he sinks into her arms and closes his eyes, letting go.

He thinks he can vaguely recall the time his spirit was in her hands when she pulled him from Black, of being awed by her immense power and achingly pure goodness. It had been warm and safe in her hands, he knew, and even though she had held him for only as long as it took to transfer his soul to a shell of a body, for him who had no sense of time or of being, it had been infinite, pervasive, and wonderful.

He still sometimes dreams about it. Being and nothingness. They are the rare few times when he wakes up feeling at peace.

 

_____

 

But on the day Shiro expects to see the team off as they depart Earth once more, he’s instead suddenly cornered by a very large, very loyal teleporting wolf in order to then be confronted by a very furious Keith.

“You were never going to tell us, were you?” Keith snarls. “You were just going to let us leave and then die, and we would never have known!”

Shiro blinks in confusion, but then he sees what’s in Keith’s clenched fist. His medical records. His heart starts to race as panic sets in. “Where did you get those? You’re not supposed to—”

“I don’t care!” Keith shouts at him. “I broke into the medical database because I knew you were hiding something, and I wish my suspicions had been wrong! What happened to ‘there’s no one in the entire universe I trust more than you’, Shiro? Or was that a lie too?”

Shiro flinches, wishing he could scour away the painful sensation of feeling pried open and exposed. The cold, sick sensation of failure seeps in through the gaps. His secret is out. The one thing he thought he could do for the team was to keep them away from this, and he couldn’t even do that. “It’s not a lie, Keith. I meant every word. I just...this isn’t something you should have to worry about right now, so I made an executive decision.”

“You said it yourself: you’re not our leader, so you don’t get to try and tell me what I should and shouldn’t worry about. You lied to everyone—the whole team. We’re your friends! We care about you!”

“There are more important things in this universe than me.”

Keith’s hands bunch themselves in Shiro’s tunic, shaking him as if he could shake some sense into him as well. “There’s nothing more important to me than you!”

His words ring in Shiro’s ears. He sees it in Keith’s eyes as breathlessly easy as reading a book: the fear, the anger, the—

Keith’s eyes clear and then widen in panic, realizing what he’s just said. “Shiro….”

He starts to let go, reeling back, but Shiro stops him with a hand to the back of his neck, keeping him close, pushing their foreheads together.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He repeats it, again and again, until the words turn into mere utterances. Until Keith grabs onto him just as desperately.

 

_____

 

They take over a private conference room and Shiro is all but manhandled into the seat at the end as if part of his punishment is to gaze down the long lines of the table and meet each and every disappointed and saddened face. It certainly does the job in properly shaming him. His cheeks feel like they’ll never stop burning.

Shiro can’t lift his gaze from the smooth planes of the table's surface for very long when he addresses the room. “I wasn’t trying to lie to you. I just didn’t want to distract you from the overall goal. The good of the team is supposed to be more important. The universe is supposed to be more important.”

“I think the team leader should decide what’s important,” Keith says shortly, to which Shiro has no defense. He’s still angry, but he’s barely left Shiro’s side since their fight. “How long do you have?”

“I’m not sure,” Shiro sighs, hating the way his answer will further affect things. “Not very long, probably. My body’s deteriorating faster than it should be. The doctors think it’s because of everything that’s happened."

“So wait,” Lance says, “When Haggar made like a million clones of you, they all had the same issue? Talk about a design oversight….uh, I mean, man, that sucks, Shiro.”

“Thank you, Lance,” Shiro dryly says before Keith can snap at him.

“Couldn’t Allura try her healing thingy power on Shiro?” Hunk suggests. “She healed the Balmera.”

“I...I don’t know. What I do is more like being a conduit. I’m not sure if the energy I can transfer holds any particular healing properties. The Balmera is simply designed to accept energy in order to activate its own self-repairing abilities,” Allura says, sounding disappointed and frustrated with herself. Coran lays a hand over hers in comfort, which seems to give her the renewed hope to earnestly add, “But I am willing to try.”

“How long have you been experiencing your symptoms?” Pidge asks, mind almost visibly at work.

“Since I was brought back,” Shiro answers. Both Keith and Allura wince, as if it had been their fault. “This was always going to happen eventually, no matter what body I had.”

“But you were physically fine when you had your cybernetic arm, right? No symptoms at all?” Pidge asks in a half distracted manner. Shiro wonders if she even truly registers his confirming nod. “Maybe something in the the Galra tech was keeping your illness from advancing. I still have its code. I can comb through it to see if there’s anything we can use.”

“Even if there is something, we still don’t have the resources to replicate it,” Krolia points out. “There’s nothing here on Earth that comes close to Galran technology.”

“So, what, we’re just going to go out and find another cybernetic arm lying around in a storage closet somewhere?” Hunk asks.

“Shiro’s arm was customized for his human physiology,” Coran muses as he strokes his mustache. “I doubt the Galrans were mass producing them.”

“If Haggar made a thousand Shiro clones or whatever, why not just, like,” Lance says, flapping a hand around, “grab a few and put Shiro in a shiny new body as each one goes?” Like Shiro just need to be fitted for new shoes every once in awhile.

The quality of the ensuing silence is one distinctly of disgust.

“That sounds rather horrifying,” Romelle says, voicing the sentiment etched across the others’ faces.

“Maybe Lance has a point.”

Everyone turns to Keith in shock, including Lance, who says, “What? Really?”

“Not about the bodies, that was stupid.” Lance shrugs like he expected no less. “But if Haggar was able to clone Shiro, then she must have his DNA somewhere. Even if all the existing clones were destroyed in the station, I doubt she’d eliminate the possibility of making more. If we can find out where she kept it, and if Pidge can find something in the code from your arm….”

“Then we can fix the code at the source!” Pidge says brightly.

“Exactly,” Keith says. “The clone bodies I saw at the station were...they were like blank slates.” His eyes meet Shiro’s. “Black hair. Two arms. No scars.”

“Like Haggar had to create a template,” Pidge explains, growing more animated, “and then had to, er, customize Shiro to look exactly like he was before. If we can fix the initial template, maybe we can develop a gene therapy program to stop or altogether reverse the disease. The applications this kind of technology could have are endless...we could cure anything!”

“It’s also technology that’s ripe for abuse,” Shiro says, dousing the building enthusiasm in the room. Yet he can’t find it in himself to feel guilty for it. There’s something disquieting about the way they're casually discussing his physical being.

And the notion that the Galra Empire still had his DNA on file somewhere like a loaded gun is _terrifying_.

“This discussion is based on a lot of if's, but worse, it splits your priorities,” Shiro says, looking each team member in the eye. “You need to concentrate on rebuilding the Castle.”

“There’s no reason why we can’t do both,” Keith argues, flint eyed. “As team leader, I make the decisions, but for the sake of democracy, let’s take it to a vote. All in favor of finding a cure for Shiro in addition to rebuilding the Castle?”

Aside from Shiro’s, every hand around the table immediately shoots up.

Keith looks at him smugly. “Looks like you’re overruled.”

He should be grateful, he knows. He has friends who truly care about him, who would scour the universe to find him an impossible cure. Who would face down the entire Galran Empire if there was even a small chance at one.

Instead, Shiro is _angry_. Unbelievably, inexplicably angry. His throat closes up with it, so that the only sound he can choke out is, “Why.”

Maybe Keith understands, or maybe he can sense Shiro’s fury because it’s an emotion that he’s lived closely with for so long, because his eyes soften, and the depth of that nameless thing revealed within them immediately snuffs out his rage, quick as a summer storm.

“Because I’m not giving up on you, even if you’re giving up on yourself.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, this thing gets longer without my permission.

Although the desert is scorchingly hot by day, it’s bitterly cold come nightfall, but Shiro braves the low temperatures for the gift of clear night skies. It’s one of his most favorite things about the Garrison: stars scattered like grains of sand, the sense of vertigo if he gazes up and out for too long.

The difference in perspective never fails to put him in a different frame of mind as well. He remembers looking out at these same skies years ago, ignorant of all that awaited him. Arrogant, even. He was going to be an intrepid explorer, a discoverer, one of the first men to push the boundaries of the furthest reaches of space.

It’s all quite laughable now.

Shiro didn’t tell anyone where he’d be tonight, but Keith finds him anyway.

He announces his arrival by settling down beside Shiro on the large sandstone outcroppings, his legs sprawling out in front of him insouciantly.

“You railroaded me in there,” Shiro says. Statement of fact. He’s not even very angry anymore, but the memory of it calls up enough residual resentment to infuse his tone with a bite.

“If you’re looking for an apology, you’ll be disappointed.” Keith’s voice is hard, his walls up, heels dug in. It’s one of the qualities Shiro likes the most about him, but right now it just makes his hackles rise. “What I don’t understand is why you insist that nothing can be done and we shouldn’t bother. You would never accept that if it were any of us.”

He’s not wrong, although Shiro likes to think he would have ultimately respected that team member’s choice above all. If it had been Keith...well. He can hardly contemplate it.

It’s a long time before he can speak again, but Keith waits.

“Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m real,” he admits, bowing his head like he’s ashamed. “And sometimes I forget which sets of memories belong to whom. When people look at me and know what I am, I see the fear in their eyes.” It used to be the way they warily eyed his arm when he had it, now it’s the whole of him. It’s usually masked well, but it’s there.

“I don’t think that!” Keith sits up, crowds in close like he has something to prove. He smells like hot sand and metal. “Shiro, I know who you are. You helped me save the others in the Black Lion, I felt it. I felt _you_. I’d know you anywhere now.”

He’s a mass of heat against the chill in the air. Shiro leans against him. Allows himself to rest his temple against Keith’s because something’s changed, like whatever polite boundary that was built upon reassuring shoulder touches and nods of approval has long since been demolished. “And what if what you saw was corrupted like Allura’s father?”

“The Black Lion would never have allowed that,” Keith says fiercely.

“I’m afraid this cure would change me even more, Keith. I’m afraid of losing myself. I know it’s selfish, but I’ve lost so much already.”

Keith turns his head, catching Shiro’s gaze. They breathe each other’s air. Shiro can see the reflection of stars in his eyes. “If you ever get lost, I’ll always find you. I promise.”

Shiro isn’t one to give into his instincts, but when so many pieces of himself have been carved away already, he desperately, blindly grasps onto what’s left. Instead of pulling back, inserting a measure of cooler, safer distance, return them to even footing, he gives into the momentum, tipping his face up until his lips brush across Keith’s daringly and then is immediately paralyzed by fear.

But maybe of all the people in the universe, Keith is the one most perfectly suited to him, because he rushes in to fill in the space Shiro leaves, pressing forward until their lips meet and he’s reaching up to caress Shiro’s face.

He forgets what it feels like to be trapped in the confines of his body and finds his entire awareness consumed by Keith’s instead. He’s aware of the wider breadth of Keith’s shoulders, the more prominent, sharper line of his jaw, the sandpaper scrape of a past-five o’clock shadow now coating it. The smooth calluses of Keith’s hand. The demanding nature of his soft mouth that he can only submit to.

When Shiro draws back and his lips cool and his heart stops its tumultuous rhythm, he slowly opens his eyes. Keith is looking at him tenderly. “Keith….”

“Don’t you dare tell me this was a mistake,” Keith says.

It’s all a mistake, Shiro wants to say. He doesn’t have much time left, and Keith has bigger concerns and greater things to accomplish. The right thing would be to end it here and now. 

But for once, he doesn’t want to do the right thing. Maybe he’s too weak and too tired, but what he wants more than anything is to simply let himself _have_.

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” Shiro says. “Do you want to spend your last night with me instead of listening to Hunk’s and Lance’s snoring?”

Keith’s face slowly breaks out into a grin. “Yeah, I really do.”

 

_____

 

“You know,” Keith manages to say between increasingly more passionate kisses, all tongues and teeth when Shiro presses him against the wall once the door to his rooms slides shut, “I always fantasized that this would happen in a heat-of-the-moment kind of way, like in the middle of an argument, but I’m glad it turned out like this instead.”

Shiro relinquishes the spot on Keith’s neck he was tasting in order to quirk a brow at him. “You thought about this before?”

“I’ve thought about this since the day you first gave me your card.”

Keith doesn’t let him dwell on that revelation for too long, drawing Shiro back in to kiss away any lingering thoughts. He has to use his arm to brace himself against the wall, which leaves Keith’s clever hands free to roam at his leisure, trailing down Shiro’s chest and stomach, pulling him in by his waist until the hard lines of their cocks meet and they’re both gasping into each other’s mouths.

Tipping his head up, Keith bites out a groan, “Here—let me—” and reaches between them to free their erections from the their clothes. The first touch is like searing fire, Keith’s long fingers wrapped around them both, his hips thrusting forward against Shiro’s, his cock dragging deliciously. “Just to take the edge off.”

Keith captures his mouth again as they move against each other in an increasingly wetter, messy pace, harsh pants the only rhythmic sound in the room along with the slick fleshy strokes of Keith’s hand, until the sensation proves too much and Shiro buries his face in Keith’s damp neck in a moan as they both spill over Keith’s hand within a breath of each other.

For several heartbeats, Shiro’s mind goes blissfully blank and the perpetual weariness that has been building in his bones turns into a languorous afterglow. He barely keeps himself from slumping against Keith, who doesn’t seem to mind, in any case, mouthing along Shiro’s jaw as he catches his breath.

Shiro is slow to open his eyes, and when he does, Keith is looking back at him, still dazed. “Bedroom?” he prompts.

Keith can only nod, before leaning forward to kiss him again, once, lingering, and then breaking it off to give him a playful shove in the appropriate direction, which barely makes him budge so much as an inch.

Shiro grins lazily, even more so when Keith grows impatient and simply grabs his hand to lead him there himself.

“Should this be weirder than it is?” he feels compelled to ask when Keith has managed to successfully strip them out of their soiled clothes and the only thing Shiro can do to help is move his limbs this way and that, lift his feet obediently when wordlessly urged to. Maybe it should be weirder or at least more difficult, certainly more awkward, but it isn’t. Not even the less than sexy but necessary removal of their boots and socks.

But they’ve always worked on every level, why should this be any different?

They’ve seen each other naked before, both at the Garrison and in the Castle, the natural byproduct of military-style communal bath areas, but this is the first time Shiro shamelessly looks with _desire_. Keith is all long lines and lithe grace, compact muscles lending him the lethal speed and agility he needs to move with the Blades of Marmora. He has new scars too—flanking his sides, across his arms, his hip, one running down his thigh—ones whose origins Shiro doesn’t know, but he can guess the type of weapon that inflicted them and with how much force. They are stripes mirrored thricefold across his own body, and Shiro doesn’t know whether to be sad that Keith has known what it is like to fight for his life and feel pain, or relieved that they share an experience that so few others can.

Warriors, he thinks.

Keith sinks down to his knees, gazing up at him with an expression Shiro hesitations to call _worshipful_ , but he can’t find a better alternative.

“I think we’ve had enough weird in our lives to last us a lifetime,” he says before he takes Shiro’s cock into his mouth, coaxing him into an eager second round.

 

_____

 

The team leaves early the next morning to much fanfare, the entire Garrison assembled outside to see them off. The cadets are still wide eyed and slack jawed, barely able to shake anyone’s hand when they go down the line. Even Commander Iverson grudgingly salutes the team and gives them a stiff nod of grudging respect to accompany his firm handshake.

They all take their turns at a more personal goodbye with Shiro. Hunk nearly breaks his ribs with his hug.

Keith hangs back while the others board their lions, his wolf remaining loyally at his side. He stands too close to Shiro without actually giving into the temptation to touch him and looks like he wants to say something, but no words emerge.

Shiro takes mercy on him. “Good hunting,” he says. His smile may even be a little goofy when he remembers the taste of Keith’s mouth.

“We’ll return as soon as we can,” Keith assures him, even though they both know it will take months at the very least. “Pidge and Hunk have an idea about building teludav gateways on the ground between systems. It’ll be much easier to transport goods and people that way. If we can get it working, we can get to and from Earth much faster.”

“I have full faith in Pidge and Hunk’s ability to make it happen,” Shiro says. The wolf whines a bit, nudging Shiro’s hands with a cold nose until Shiro strokes his head. “You never did tell me his name.”

Keith looks somewhat embarrassed. “To be honest, I never really thought about it. I just kept calling him, ‘Boy.’” The wolf perks his ears and stares up at his master. “...which apparently he thinks is his name now, so.”

Shiro bites back a smile and rewards the wolf with a good scratch behind his ears. “Take good care of him for me, Boy.”

“We’re going to get through this. We’ll find a way, Shiro,” Keith insists. “I just need you to hang in there. Wait for me. Please.”

It never fails to awe and humble him when he thinks about how often Keith has been there for him, come back for him, saved him against impossible odds. By all rights, it should be easy to believe Keith will save him from this too.

But he has lived with this shadow for so long, long before he ever met Keith. It’s the one enemy he’s never managed to defeat, the one battle he could never win.

“I’ll be here,” he tells Keith, and damn the onlookers: he reaches up and cups Keith’s face, burns the memory of his features into his mind. Puts it with the recollections of the way it felt to dig his fingers into Keith’s slim hips and scrape his teeth across the ridges of his scars.

Keith’s hand rises to cover his, squeezing his fingers like he’s about to change his mind and drag Shiro back onboard with him, but at last, with noticeable reluctance, he lets Shiro go and keeps stepping away until the distance feels safe enough where he can turn his back and board Black, Boy trotting close at his heels.

The Lions let out a mighty collective roar, startling the Garrison, before launching themselves into the air with a powerful leap that makes the ground tremble, all to the collective _ooh’s_ and _ahhh’s_ of the crowd.

Shiro remains long after the Lions disappear out of orbit, after the last cadet stumbles back to his rooms and the officers have all returned to their stations. He stares up at the benign blue sky.

The heavy weight of gravity pushes on his bones. His feet remain half covered by the unsettled dust.

 

_____

 

In the wake of any life-changing event, Shiro falls back on the comfort of a routine that many have often called punishing. He takes the doctor’s advice to heart and keeps active from the second he’s up at five a.m. to run across the more stable footing of the still-cold earth to the very moment he collapses in his bed at night in a thankfully dreamless, exhausted sleep.

But early mornings are his favorite because the loneliness feels more like solitude. It’s a time that feels perpetually in flux, when the skies turn purple with the first smears of dawn and the stars above gradually cede their claim.

He tries not to think about what it would have been like not so long ago, before Zarkon, his first life, jogging through the Castle hallways with Keith while debating tactics and strategy, then sparring for an hour afterwards.

Months spent in Black during their slow crawl through space. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Pull-ups. Leg raises. Planks. Jogging about in what small confines they had.

Most of the desert is unremarkable, but as he approaches a canyon of rock croppings, the familiarity of their shape creeps up on him like a high tide. How he used to race hover bikes up here with Keith, a mutual adrenaline addiction sated under the guise of responsible pilot practice. He remembers thinking Keith had too much pent up aggression, and that giving it a healthy outlet would hopefully mean less disciplinary meetings.

But really, those rides had been as much for him as they had been for Keith. The feeling of hot wind and sand whipping at his face. His surroundings blurring around him. That lurching, almost sickening feeling in his stomach as he pushed the throttle and hurled himself at maximum velocity over the cliff. Having long since mastered that particular dive to the point where his body simply knew the right speed and distance at which to right himself, that split second after the rocky ledge disappeared from beneath his bike, hurtling towards the ground too far below, always held an infinite branching path of possibilities stemming from decisions and indecisions. And in that abundance of _what if’s_ , he had felt free.

But, like always, he’d kick in the thrusters at precisely the right time, and his bike would soar and he could convince himself it was better. At the time, it was the closest he could get to flying through space. He had felt equal parts proud and guilty when Keith had looked up at him in awe.

“I’d be lucky to be a pilot half as good as you,” Keith had said one time, stars in his eyes.

“My skills come from hours and hours of practice,” Shiro had told him. “And you have a raw talent like nothing I’ve ever seen. One day, you’ll be better than me.”

Shiro slows his steps as he approaches the cliff edge and ignores the cramping in his calves as he takes in the endless horizon of rock formations and sand. With the stars still glittering overhead at the far edges of the sky, he can almost pretend he’s on an alien planet, seeing what no man has ever seen.

He _has_ seen things no man has ever seen. Done things no other man has ever done. He should be grateful for the opportunity. He should be proud of his accomplishments. He should be content for even this short life of adventure and purpose.

But that has always been his eternal flaw, hasn’t it? He isn’t.

 

_____

 

His patience is tested while a young, nervous tech fumbles to attach the first prosthetic prototype to his shoulder port’s existing connections. Shiro feels like they’re trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with live wires. It’s like knives being stabbed into the base of his skull, but he clenches his jaw and doesn’t make a sound.

“Uhhh, sorry,” the tech, Sarvesh, stutters out when a particularly nasty shock makes Shiro twitch despite himself, “There’s just a lot of trial and error involved here. And normally it’s not on a live subject.”

“It’s fine,” Shiro grits out.

“I think that should be the last of it,” Sarvesh says before stepping back. “What do you think?”

He’d been purposely keeping his attention away from his new arm ever since they started, not wanted to color his perceptions until everything was ready, but now Shiro turns his head to look down at the latest foreign object to be inflicted upon his body.

The arm is more shining chrome than the matte surface of his previous arm. It’s not quite as elegant as Galra tech, but it’s not as bad as he’d feared. For all intents and purposes, it’s shaped to match the dimensions of his other arm and it feels—Shiro rolls his shoulder and tries to gauge the weight— _heavy_ , but that could also be the novel sensation of having an arm there at all just as his body had become accustomed to its absence.

“It looks good,” Shiro says approvingly.

“Great!” Sarvesh perks up with more confidence than before. “Well, let’s give it a little juice and see if it works!”

He does something with his tablet, and after a few seconds, Shiro braces himself against the irritating tingling sensation that slowly crawls up his shoulder and tickles at the back of his skull.

“Can you feel anything?”

“A little,” Shiro says. “It’s more like a low whine. Like a mosquito.”

Sarvesh frowns, and fiddles about with something else. “Try doing something with it.”

Shiro tries to follow the tingling sensation back down his arm, willing it to move, anything, but it feels like his mind is beating against a sheer wall of rock. His metal fingers don’t so much as twitch. “I’m trying, but….”

“I was afraid of this,” Sarvesh sighs, powering the arm down. Shiro can’t help but feel relieved to have the sensation gone. “The Galra connections in the shoulder port look like they were built to hold vastly greater amounts of power. We can’t input that kind of voltage without frying or melting our own tech, but anything less than that’s barely transmitting through the port. And to be honest, I don’t even know what powered your old arm in the first place and can’t possibly think of an equivalent energy source we could use that wouldn’t be drained inside of a few minutes.”

“So what you’re saying,” Shiro wants to clarify, “is that it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever be able to get this arm to work in the same way as my previous one?”

“Not unless we go and take out the shoulder port and the, uh, pre-existing connections to start from scratch. But since they’ve already been fused to your nerves, it’s almost certain we’d do more damage than good.”

Shiro swallows and nods. “Then I think it’s best if we just stop right here. It’s not vital that I have two arms, and I know you have more important things to work on.” It hardly seems worth it, all these resources spent on him for something he wouldn’t even be using for very long.

No one likes defeat, Sarvesh included. His shoulders slump. He looks, of all things, guilty. “I’m sorry we couldn’t do more. You’re like our hero. It’d be the least we could do.”

Shiro doesn’t quite wince, but it’s a near thing. _Shiro the Hero_ , he remembers the crowds chanting. “Sometimes putting in the effort is enough. Thank you for trying, at least.”

 

_____

 

“Have you considered getting back into teaching?” Commander Iverson gruffly cuts to the chase as soon as Shiro sits down for the requested meeting. “You still have a lot to offer here. Your knowledge and experiences shared with our cadets would be invaluable, and it has to be better to better than running around the base like a rat in a cage.”

Shiro can read between the lines well enough. _Time to make yourself useful_.

And he does like teaching. He likes it when others do well, push themselves beyond what they think are their limits to realize a new capacity within themselves. Likes the spark of delight in their faces when they understand a new concept or pass their tests. He likes knowing the future is safe because the best and brightest minds are working on it. He likes knowing he’s done something to ensure that.

So he gets a schedule of classes to run and a roster of cadets to teach, and all of this is seamlessly folded into his routine as well. The cadets all seem so much younger than he remembers, but they’re eager and talented, plying him with questions about his time as a Paladin, what it was like to face off against the Galra. How it felt to be a part of Voltron.

“You’re in each other’s minds,” Shiro tells his class. They’re all visibly leaning forward, practically straining their ears to catch every word. It’d be amusing if it weren’t so uncomfortable to speak of something so...personal. “And then something clicks. You move as one. You’re one being.”

“That sounds freaky,” says a boy who reminds him of Lance. “I’d hate for someone to be in my brain, knowing what I was thinking.”

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be a picnic for that poor bastard either,” someone else sasses back, producing a ripple of laughter.

“It was at first,” Shiro admits. “Everything you try to hide from yourself and others gets exposed, makes you vulnerable. But it also forces you to trust your team in ways you didn’t think you were capable of. Then, it stops feeling invasive and it starts to be...comforting, knowing you’re not alone, but part of something larger than yourself. And isn’t that why we’re all here in the first place?”

"Do you miss it?" a girl asks.

For several telling seconds, Shiro can't think of a reply. The answer gets lodged in his throat. His chest hurts. An ache so deep and profound, he can't even begin to know what exactly he misses the most. He used to be a part of something. Now he is not.

"Every day," he tells her, too honest. It turns a lighthearted Q&A session into something decidedly more awkward.

Shiro takes pity on his class and dismisses them early.

 

_____

 

 _The doctor was right_ , Shiro thinks one day as he’s well into his stride, halfway through his second daily run. It’s so much better for him to take it easier now. He feels stronger, more energetic. Alive.

The heat of midday is beating down upon him. The air shimmers with it. Sweat courses down his face and soaks into his shirt. His muscles are burning with effort. His body feels like it is _his_. The blood is pumping in his veins and the endorphins make him feel like he could keeping going forever.

 _Maybe I can get through this after all._ It's a thought shrouded in optimism. It’s the last thought he remembers having before—

 

_____

 

Shiro wakes up. There’s a blinding fluorescent light overhead. He feels like he’s been flattened by a commercial hover railcar. There are machines beeping merrily around him. Though his head is groggy and slow, he’s been in the medical ward often enough to recognize it almost immediately.

It’s like ripping open a seam just to part his lips. “What happened?”

“Essentially, heart failure. Your heart couldn’t pump enough blood through your body fast enough. You blacked out in the desert,” the doctor says. “We had to implant an LVAD to keep it working.”

“Oh.” Shiro cranes his neck to see a thick layer of gauze and bandages swathing his chest. Open heart surgery. No wonder why he feels so awful. “I was feeling fine.”

“Only you, Shiro, could take the concept of relaxation and drive it into the ground.” The doctor smiles sadly to soften his rebuke.

“Had to be a failure at something,” Shiro says lightly, his eyes falling shut of their own accord as sleep starts to drag him back under again. The drugs are nice. They make him not care. “Guess you can give me that ETD now, Doc?”

The doctor presses his lips together in an unhappy line. “Let’s just take it one day at a time from here on out.”


	4. Chapter 4

Recovery from this sort of thing, the doctor says, typically takes upwards of two weeks, but it soon becomes apparent he won’t be bouncing back so easily from this one. He’s tired all the time, spends most of those two weeks sleeping or being made to hobble around the halls for a mandated length before he can return to bed and pick up where he left off.

It’s nice, really. He’s always been acutely aware of the passing of time, but now it just goes by in a hazy flow, and he can selectively tune in and out of it as he pleases. 

He dreams, but they aren’t the usual troubled ones that sharply pull him back into wakefulness and keep him there for the rest of the night. Perhaps there’s something about the drugs he’s on, but his dreams are startlingly technicolor bright and aggressively cheerful.

Dreams of the tattered fractions of the Galra Empire declaring a ceasefire and deciding to work together to live in peace with the rest of the universe.

Dreams of a time after Voltron can be retired, and he and Keith spend a month on some ridiculously beautiful planet with white sand beaches and warm, crystal blue waters. Of Keith’s skin caramelizing beneath the sun and hot to touch when Shiro skims his fingers over it.

Of Romelle and Hunk’s absurdly lavish wedding where the choice of food dishes outnumber the flowers. Pidge getting awarded with the universe’s highest honors for her technological breakthroughs. Lance becoming Commander of the Garrison just to rub it in Keith’s face. The Altean people finally re-emerging as strong and populous as before on New Altea.

Of witnessing the birth of new stars, visiting new planets, meeting new races, seeing everything there is to see in the entire universe, but more importantly, Keith being a constant at his side. Earth’s ambassadors. They do it together, always. For a lifetime.

He wants that life. Wants it so _badly_ , he could stay in that dream forever.

When they start reducing the amount of drugs in his system, clarity begins to take shape in his senses for longer and longer lengths of time. The dreams begin to fade, in color, in frequency, in wonder.

Then he’s fully and painfully back in his brain and body, skull pounding from drug withdrawal and chest a constant aching throb that now contains even more machine parts.

He looks down at his limbs and is startled by their frailness. He’s lost significant amounts of muscle mass and he feels as weak as a kitten. He can’t even make it down the full length of the medical ward before his trembling legs crumple beneath him. He can barely lift himself out of bed.

“Fuck,” he says out loud when no one can hear him. “ _Fuck_.”

 

_____

 

The cane is humbling, but a necessity. He walks slowly, painstakingly, never too far from the base because he gets winded. But he walks, keeps up a new routine now, tries to build back his strength and endurance anyway. Walks to shake out the agonizing cramps that seize up his legs and the newly permanent ache in his lower back from having to sit more often.

There are always knots in his shoulder for his physical therapist to massage out, aches in his hips from a lopsided gait. Everything hurts now, even when he gingerly climbs into bed at the end of the day. Sometimes it keeps him up at night, sometimes he’s just so exhausted he manages an uneasy sleep anyway.

He’s still a few years away from thirty, but he feels decades older.

Starting to look it as well. He’s been relieved of his teaching duties. He doesn’t get a lot of greetings in the halls, like people don’t recognize him anymore, or don’t want to. They avert their eyes and pretend like they don’t see him, and he’s grateful for it. It takes so much more energy to keep up the stoic mask and tell them he’s doing well, maintaining an optimistic attitude. His can-do spirit, they always admired that about him.

He still gets up before sunrise to go outside even if he’ll pay for it later in more aches and stiffness. Running is out of the cards, so he just sits and looks up and strains his eyes in trying not to blink, searching and identifying constellations to bide the time. Like he’s waiting on something.

It takes him a long time to realize what he’s actually waiting for, or more precisely, _who_ , and when he does, he internally berates himself for being so foolish. He’s not some fisherman’s wife longing for the day the village ships come back in.

He wills himself to stop. Just stop.

 

_____

 

His grandmother used to say to him, always on the night before his birthday, _go to bed early and wait for good news_. He would try, but would always be too excited to sleep. By the early hours of the morning, he’d finally exhaust himself and wake up late to find a new outfit waiting for him at the end of his futon along with a bag of sweets he knew came from her rather than his parents.

He certainly gets a lot more rest these days if not necessarily good quality sleep, but maybe it’s enough, because one day, with very little forewarning, the team comes _back_.

They appear right in the middle of the base. Or rather, a massive shimmering circular _wormhole_ appears.

Naturally, everyone in the Garrison goes a little crazy, thinking they’re under attack and readying their defenses.

Commander Iverson tries to drag Shiro back, “We don’t know what that thing is. You need to get inside with the cadets!”

Shiro tries shrug him off, which is no mean feat these days. “I don’t think it’s….”

“What?” Commander Iverson barks in his face.

The tension ratchets up with weapons primed and ready to fire at the first sign of hostility until the Black Lion emerges, soon followed by the others in quick succession.

Keith is the first to step out of his Lion. He eyes the circle of weapons aimed at him and shrugs. “So, yeah, we got interplanetary wormholes to happen.”

Commander Iverson nearly has an aneurysm right there and then.

“Keith,” Shiro can’t help but admonish, even if it comes out more as fond.

Keith focuses on him, and, oh, Shiro had forgotten what he must look like now compared to the last time they saw each other. He witnesses it all on Keith’s face for one quick moment—shock, devastation, guilt—before the mask is firmly back in place and Keith tries to fit on a tight smile.

“Shiro! Hey man, it’s good to see you! Still rocking the silver fox thing, I see. I like it, I like it.” Lance calls out as he moves past Keith, jabbing a quick elbow to his ribs, and gives Shiro a more effusive greeting.

The others follow suit, even though Hunk is much more gentle in the way he wraps his arms around Shiro like he could break. By the time Pidge steps back, Keith seems to have recovered his wits, stepping in close and perhaps embracing Shiro a touch too earnestly and too long before just as abruptly stepping back without saying anything.

Allura’s already speaking with Commander Iverson. Romelle and Coran are back on Olkarion, Allura explains, where, with the Olkari’s help, they managed to construct the first planet-based teludav gateway. “And we brought enough materials here with us to begin construction of another gateway for Earth!”

Predictably, Iverson isn’t pleased. “So the plan is to leave an open door to Earth for any sort of alien to simply walk right through?”

“The teludav can only be operated by Allura, Sir,” Lance says before giving her a lopsided grin that manages to be slightly less smitten than usual on account of the situation. “She’s literally the gatekeeper here.”

“Our goal is to build a gateway on every Coalition planet so we can be nimble about distributing resources and people between those who need it,” Allura adds. Shiro has seen her lash out with a ferocity that could make even Haggar cower in fear, but when it worked to her advantage, she could possess the sweetest, most charming disposition in the known universe. “We will, of course, build the gateway here in the Garrison where I know you’ll be able to protect it. After all, Commander, aren’t we stronger together?”

“Well...yes, of course!” Iverson stammers and is even, if Shiro’s eyes aren’t deceiving him, _blushing_. “I look forward to hearing more about your plans, Princess.”

“ _Our_ plans, Commander,” Lance says, stepping in with a scowl on his face.

“Thank you, Commander,” Allura gracefully smooths over. “Why don’t we begin the debrief now? I’m rather eager to catch you up on our activities so we can begin construction.”

“You guys go ahead,” Keith says to them. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

After a silent conversation is carried out through shared, knowing glances, the team parts ways with Keith and Shiro to accompany Iverson back inside.

“I didn’t see your mother,” Shiro begins when it’s just them. “Or your wolf.”

“My mom is back with the Blades, along with Boy. They’re on...a special mission,” Keith says vaguely. “I should probably catch you up on some things.”

“We can talk in my quarters,” Shiro offers, because they’ll have the most privacy there and he’s too tired to remain upright for much longer. “Come on.”

Shiro leans on his cane heavily to pivot and lurch back into movement after too long standing still. At first, Keith looks like he wants to help, but he thinks better of it and simply falls in line beside him.

“I’m sorry about earlier. I didn’t think things would happen so fast,” Keith admits softly.

“Neither did I. There were unexpected complications.”

“Like what?” At Shiro’s continued silence, Keith again demands, “Like what, Shiro?”

Fortunately, they’re close enough to Shiro’s quarters that he doesn’t have to answer before they’re safely behind a closed door. But when Keith turns to him expectantly, Shiro doesn’t know how to put it into words, the last few months of feeling like he’s been steadily sliding downhill no matter how much he digs his fingers in, the astounding feeling of isolation in the midst of such close quarters with so many others.

In the end, he always spoke better in actions than words, so he clumsily pulls up his shirt to reveal the long midline scar bisecting his chest that’s still too pink to be old. Above his heart sits a black, nearly flat disc embedded into his flesh, the one thing that’s keeping him alive.

Keith stares at it with something like horror. “What is that?”

“Something that keeps my heart pumping blood. Doesn’t want to do it on its own these days.” He tugs his shirt down self-consciously. “Recovery’s taking awhile.”

“And I wasn’t here. You could have….”

Shiro shakes his head. “Don’t go down that path. Trust me, it doesn’t lead anywhere good.”

When Keith hardly looks consoled, Shiro steps forward and wraps his arms around him, holds him, like he’s wanted to for so long. He presses his face against Keith’s hair, breathes in, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to say, _I didn’t think I’d see you again_ , so he contents himself with, “I missed you.”

Keith practically melts against him, his hand coming to rest tentatively over the LVAD in Shiro’s chest. “There were so many times I was tempted to just turn around and fly back. I think I drove everyone crazy trying to get the teludav rebuilt so I could get back here faster.”

“I’m just glad you’re here now,” Shiro says, finally pulling away enough to at least navigate them to more even conversational footing. “Tell me everything.”

And so, Keith does.

The Lions, while operational enough to fly individually, still don’t have enough power to form Voltron, and likely won’t until they can rebuild the Castle, but collecting all the resources necessary to do so is an ongoing process. Some of the crucial items they need no longer seem to exist, gone when Altea was destroyed, so they’ve had to come up with some rather creative alternatives. “It’s like trying to build a cruiser using directions written in a different language. I mean, _literally_ , that’s what’s happening here.”

But the resources to rebuild a teludav were the first and easiest to come together, and that’s when Pidge and Hunk proposed the idea of building a network of gateways between Coalition planets to move around more quickly, they mostly concentrated their efforts there first.

“And what’s more, Pidge may have isolated the Galra code in your arm that kept you healthy. She’s been working on it ever since,” Keith finishes on a hopeful note. “So we’re one step closer.”

It’s...it’s more than Shiro ever thought was even possible, but he can’t let himself hope just yet. Too many things could still go wrong. “And your mother?”

“Carrying out the second part of what we need to fix you.”

Which means she’s on the front lines, very likely in enemy territory, trying to unearth more of Haggar’s dirty secrets.

“What if everything was destroyed at the station?” Shiro dares to bring up. “The operation was close to being successful. My role was nearly done and it would have been a good way way to neatly tie up all loose ends.”

Instead of a vehement denial like he expected, Shiro is surprised when Keith says, “We considered the possibility. We even went back there first to see if anything could be salvaged, but everything burned up in atmo.”

“So what makes you think there’s still anything out there?”

“Because we found another cloning facility.”

Shiro pales. “What?” He starts shaking his head. “No...not that’s not…”

“Shiro, it wasn’t you,” Keith says quickly, squeezing his shoulders as if to drive the point home. “I promise, it wasn’t you. It was _Lotor_.”

He’s not entirely sure if that isn’t worse. “Lotor?”

“Yeah, Haggar’s got a real problem letting go, doesn’t she?”

“Is he back too?”

Keith shakes his head. “None of them were awake. And we made sure they never would be. But when Pidge hacked into their system, we couldn’t find any of Lotor’s biodata. We don’t even think the clones were grown there. I think those facilities were just being used as storage units. Which means the real data Haggar keeps is….”

“Somewhere out there. And likely only she knows where,” Shiro finishes. He doesn’t know what to make of it. On one hand, there’s _hope_ , and it’s a dangerous thing to have. On the other, their chances have merely been raised from _nothing_ to merely _nearly impossible_.

But time and time again, they’ve overcome the odds.

“We have a few leads,” Keith says. “Lotor’s former generals being chief among them. They’ve likely gone back to Haggar. There are rumors that Haggar is leading one of the competing Galra factions that’s been absorbing a lot of the other major players.”

Shiro isn’t someone who holds many grudges, but the thought of Haggar brings a dark look to his face and an even darker desire to seek vengeance. “She’ll have the Galra Empire back up and running soon enough if someone doesn’t stop her. And she could bring everyone back just as before.”

“Which is why the Blades are going after her now. I would have gone with them but...but my responsibilities are to the team now,” Keith says. “Someone taught me that.”

The warmth in Keith’s tone cuts through the dark shadow of Shiro’s thoughts, makes him arch a brow playfully. “Oh really? That someone sounds very wise.”

“He can be, on occasion,” Keith graciously allows. “When he isn’t trying to be a martyr.”

“Then maybe someone just needs to give him a little hope. Show him a better way.”

“Yeah, I’ll show you a better way, old man,” Keith laughs, pulling Shiro down into a kiss that burns away any thoughts of a rejoinder. “Show you how much I missed you. Come on.”

The others are probably waiting for them in the conference room, but Shiro’s a lot slower these days. So if it takes a bit longer than expected, well, surely they’ll understand.

 

_____

 

They stay for nearly two weeks, just enough time to get the teludav working on Earth. Two weeks of not thinking about the past and decidedly ignoring the future. While everyone works tirelessly to build the gateway, even Lance, who jumps at the chance to do anything Allura asks before she can even voice the request, Shiro is shameless about monopolizing Keith’s time and Keith certainly doesn’t complain.

They probably spend the majority of it in bed where Keith doesn’t say anything about the prominence of his bones or the papery thinness of his skin, just runs his hands lovingly over them anyway.

And if they’re not in bed, they’re unabashedly cuddling on the couch and watching mindlessly silly space films and arguing about scientific accuracy even though the framework of _scientifically feasible_ has been permanently distorted by actual wormholes and clones and alien races.

And if not on the couch, they’re snuggled up beneath a shared blanket outside with a thermos of hot chocolate to catch the latest meteor shower decorating the night sky with shooting streaks of light.

There’s a kind of manic determination behind their time together. They do all the things Shiro would have liked to have done if they had more time.

Parting with Keith a second time is _harder_ though, even if Keith promises to come back far sooner and more often now between a continuous stream of kisses. That they’re getting closer. That they’ll do this. Just hold on.

A little bit longer. A little bit longer, Shiro.

Harder, because even now Shiro can see how much the team is changing, moving further away from him, a fixed point. The team dynamics are nearly seamless now. They are a tight knit unit born out of necessity. Even Lance and Keith have a stronger rapport. Time will only make those bonds stronger. There may not be room leftover for anything else.

He tries to tell himself it’s a good thing. They will have the support of each other no matter what. Even with the less than hopeless news he’s received, he knows his chances are a long shot at best and he should be preparing for what is still to be the most likely eventuality.

Get his affairs in order, as his father would say.

So Shiro spends some time writing letters to be distributed after he’s gone. Letters to his parents, to some old friends, to the team, to Keith...to Adam. It’s not easy to write with his left hand. His handwriting is clumsy and childlike, but he stubbornly persists.

By the time he’s done, his hand is nearly numb from cramping, but he’s calmer. It feels good to get his final thoughts out. Written down, they feel irrefutable. The paper is of nice quality, probably too nice for the amount of scratch outs and scribbles he’s committed against it.

He always did like being organized.

 

_____

 

It sneaks up on him. He doesn’t even realize it at first.

He’s tired, but he’s always tired. It’s just more now. He gets winded sometimes. He has to pause to lean against the wall or sit on the nearest bench, has all his rest points mapped out all over the base, but now he’s not even reaching _those_ before he’s breathing too hard, barely able to remain standing.

It all finally culminates in the moment when he stops to rest, and the world becomes so much brighter than it’s ever been before. Vibrant. Mesmerizing, even. Like an opioid-fueled dream.

The metal of the Garrison halls gleams with spotless polish. Looking out an observatory window, the sand and the rocks glow like they’re on fire. It’s stunning.

They really do live in a beautiful world. He forgets that sometimes.

He tries to catch his breath, and he can’t, and the panic sets in.

 _I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying_ , he thinks. It would be funny if it wasn’t so terrifying.

This time, he’s surrounded by plenty of people when he blacks out. At least he’s much less likely to get a nasty sunburn this time.

 

_____

 

“Do you want us to call your parents?” The doctor asks. “It’s not too late in Kyoto.”

A rare heavy rainstorm is battering at the Garrison roof. It sounds like thousands of coins being continuously dropped on a sheet of metal. The windows are smeared with trailing rivulets of water. He overheard two officers in the hall expressing their concerns about possible flooding.

“Shiro?”

Shiro turns his attention back to the doctor. It occurs to him that he’s never thought of the other man as anything but _the doctor_. Simple, logical, impersonal. He’s seen so many of them in his short life that he prefers not knowing very much about any of them at all.

He pulls the oxygen mask away. “Do they even know I’m alive?”

The doctor—Doctor Miller, Shiro mentally corrects—hesitates. “No. I don’t think anyone’s even thought to reverse your legal status.”

Shiro gives a costly huff of laughter that quickly devolves into a painful coughing fit. He finally gets it back under control after a few deep pulls of oxygen. “Then I’d hate for you to have to do some unnecessary paperwork, Doc.”

“Someone should be here with you right now,” Doctor Miller insists. “We tried contacting your teammates, but the Olkari said they’ve been off-planet answering a distress call for several days now and they don’t know when they’ll return.”

“It’s okay,” Shiro says. “They’re doing important things.”

It clearly frustrates Doctor Miller, but there’s little the man can do to change Shiro’s mind, so he busies himself with studying the output of data the room’s various machines are giving him. “Your oxygen levels aren’t great. Anything much lower and we’ll intubate. We’ll see how it plays out. Are you in any pain?”

“Just my chest. Hurts.” He barely feels like he can breathe in enough oxygen. “I’m more tired.”

“You should get some rest, Shiro, and I’ll see you tomorrow.” He gives Shiro a sympathetic look. “There’s a call button by your side if you need anything.”

He leaves, and Shiro is now alone with the symphony of all the machines propping up his deteriorating body and the clattering desert rain and the rattle of his own labored breathing.

Better to concentrate on how noisy everything is than anything else. Noisy, but rhythmic. Something that can lull him to sleep.

There is no past, no future, only now. A fixed point.

Now.

 

_____

 

He’s not really sure if the next time he wakes up is real or if he’s still dreaming. That, or the general lack of oxygen is causing him to hallucinate.

Adam is sitting in the chair next to him.

“I only found out a little while ago,” Adam says when he sees Shiro’s awake. “I just came back from the Mars mission and...well. That doesn’t matter. It’s good to see you, Takashi. Though, maybe not under these circumstances.”

Adam is still so beautiful. Young. Fine featured and erudite. There’s a slenderness to him that masks a core of steel and equally resilient will. It’s what Shiro loved most about him. He removes the mask, tucks it beneath his chin. “You were right. About everything. I drove my body to its breaking point. Now this is it.”

Adam looks at him, and Shiro used to be able to tell what he was thinking, but now he’s as unknowable to him as an alien language. Time and distance will do that. Two diverging lives. “You know what I always loved about you? I loved how determined you were to get the most out of life. You’ve lived more than a thousand men ever could, and that’s not even knowing about what you’ve done with Voltron. You were outliving _me_. It took me a long time to come to terms with it. I’m sorry for not understanding. I’m even more sorry we left things the way we did.”

He notices then, the thick gold band around Adam’s left finger. Adam, as perceptive as ever, follows his gaze.

“Are you happy?” Shiro asks him.

Adam looks up at him sadly. After a brief pause, he nods.

“Good,” Shiro says, smiling weakly. “I’m glad you moved on. I’m glad you’re getting what you deserve now. I’m sorry I couldn’t be that man. I’m sorry I was so selfish. I’m sorry I failed you.”

“You didn’t fail me.” Adam stands up and moves to sit on the bed. He takes Shiro’s hand within his. They are wonderfully warm. “We had to become two different people, meant for different things. I can look back now and be grateful for the time we had together. You always encouraged me to go after what I wanted no matter what, even when it seemed impossible. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you.”

The sting of tears makes Adam’s face blurry. “I’m so tired, Adam,” he gasps, finding it more and more difficult to keep his eyes open, but hates how the tears will spill over, down his cheeks, if he does. “And I’m scared. I don’t want this to be it. I don’t want….”

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Adam soothes, reaching up to run stroke a hand through Shiro’s hair. “You can rest now. It’s okay.”

“Will you stay?”

“Yes. I’ll be here.”

“Thank you. For everything. Thank you.”

Shiro is dimly aware of Adam replacing the mask back over his face, and the resulting rush of pure oxygen countering the heat on his wet cheeks. “Sleep, Takashi. I’ll be here.”

So Shiro does.

 

_____

 

He’s riding behind Keith, holding tightly onto his waist, as the wind pushes at his face and the sand stings his skin. He’s weak, but everything about Keith is like an anchor. He just needs to hold on, and he’ll be safe.

Keith takes sharp turns, jerking the bike and leaving plumes of dust in his wake. He laughs and it’s like music. When Shiro leans forward to press his lips against the sweat gathered on the back of Keith’s neck, he smells like burning metal.

They ride along the perilous edge of the canyon path, bits of rock crumbling and falling to the ground getting further and further away.

“I know what I’m doing, you should trust me!” Keith shouts back at him with a Devil-may-care grin, even though Shiro isn’t questioning him on it. He knows he’s safe. “You taught me this, so I hope you trust yourself!”

They speed up. Shiro feels the lurch of the engine in his stomach. There’s nothing but star studded space ahead.

“Shiro...please! You promised you would never leave me!”

He has a sword. It’s a blade of pure, bright energy emerging from his metal arm. He’s holding it to Keith’s throat as they’re going over.

“I should have abandoned you just like your parents did,” he snarls, before he presses the blade into Keith’s throat.

 

_____

 

The heart is a muscle. The lungs are muscles. The brain is a muscle. All organs are.

His disease causes muscles to deteriorate, ergo, his heart is dying. His lungs. His brain.

The faceless doctor explains this to him as he turns the pages of an anatomy book, pointing at each referred to item. Shiro looks at them for so long, he stops recognizing their human shape. Only sees an assemblage of abstract flesh-like shapes.

We need to intubate. His oxygen levels are too low.

“What does a dying brain do, Takashi?” the doctor asks him.

“Hallucinates. Dreams,” Shiro says.

“Very good.”

Shiro. You have to fight.

 

_____

 

Laughter. Keith has a wonderful laugh, low, scratchy, almost reluctantly bright, and he does it so rarely. Makes it all the more precious for hearing it.

Though, maybe not so much now. This seemed like a better idea in his head.

“There’s sand in places I don’t even want to think about right now!” Keith yelps, but can’t stop snickering anyway as he adjusts himself in Shiro’s lap and squeezes around him just so, and _oh_. Shiro grits his teeth and hisses, clutching Keith’s hips tighter. 

“You’re the one who wanted a ride in the desert,” he manages to say when the danger of this being over far too soon passes, opening his eyes to the happy gleam in Keith’s gaze.

“Not the kind of ride I was talking about, but I’m not complaining.”

“All you’ve done is complain so far.”

Keith laughs again, lower, breathier, tilting his head back and leaving a beautiful pale column for Shiro to taste. “Okay, okay,” he sighs before pressing his knees more firmly into the ground to start up a slow rise with his hips, groaning when he sinks back down.

Shiro’s too busy admiring the undulating flex and ripple of Keith’s body moving above him and savoring the tight clench of heat he’s thrusting up into that he nearly misses the way Keith nearly coos up at the sky. “Perseid shower, I think. Pretty.”

Shiro looks up too. Thin slivers of light speeding across the sky like they’re on very important missions. He sympathizes. “Make a wish?”

“I think that’s supposed to be— _ohhh_ —for shooting stars. But I’ll take it. Yeah, this is a good angle. A very good angle. I’ll wish for this very good angle to continue doing its thing.”

Keith’s nearly grinding down into his lap, legs wrapping around Shiro’s waist, pressed in close and sweaty against his chest, cock streaking his stomach with precome. His face, tipped up to the sky, is limmed in starlight, beautifully carved into pure joy.

The thought hits him with perfect clarity: he doesn’t want to be anywhere else. Doesn’t need to be. This is everything he wants, right here. Now.

“I wish this would never end,” he sighs.

You just have to hold on. A little longer. Please.

 

_____

 

He thinks he understands, about quintessence and possibility. There are other realities out there after all. It’s been confirmed. Put like that, the idea of his cloned selves doesn’t seem so disturbing. There are thousands upon thousands of versions of him out there. Even if he dies in this reality, he lives on in others. There’s a good chance he’s happy and healthy in some of them too. He hopes many of them still have a Keith in their lives.

He won’t truly die. No one ever truly dies. They’re all just energy, quintessence, taking on different shapes and sizes. Becoming differing forms. Continuing to live. Life goes on.

“Somewhere out there in the entire realm of possibility,” he whispers into Keith’s shoulder, “everything is perfect. That’s good enough for me, I think.”

Keith rolls over to face him, palming his face. “Shiro. Don’t go somewhere I can’t follow.”

Shiro smiles wistfully. “I thought you liked a challenge.”

 

_____

 

Allura is the purest being he knows. When he thinks of her, he only feels brightness, pure blinding brightness that burns away anything dark and blemished. It’s warmth and love for all things. Like the energy she channels is the source of life in the universe. To be held safe in her hands is to dwell in the cradle of life’s beginnings.

Safe. Formless. No expectations but to simply drift along to where she gently guides him.

 _For what it’s worth, I am sorry to have to do this to you again. But I think you’ll find it a better fit this time_. _There are many others who are waiting for you._

He doesn’t understand, but she is sad, worried. He reaches out to brush the thing he knows is _her_ even though it’s all _her_.

It’s okay, he wants to say. She won’t let any harm come to him.

 

_____

 

Shiro is intimately familiar with pain. It is as natural to him as breathing and blinking. It’s a part of him. It is him.

But _fuck_ , this _hurts_.

He’s born with a sharp gasp that sears the insides of his lungs and sets his heart off into a painful race. Every nerve ending lights up like a million bee stings. He might as well be on fire. Living _hurts_.

Can’t see much when he opens his eyes, a blurry smear of colors and shapes. Muffled noises like voices trying to speak underwater. Chill in the air. He clenches his hands.

Hands.

He tries to look down and see. The fog dries up a little. He makes out the line of his right arm. It’s attached to him. He can feel it. He lifts it up. Flexes his fingers.

“Another body,” he quakes.

“We couldn’t save the last one. It was too far gone for the treatment, I’m afraid.” Allura, still surrounded by a dissipating aura from the transfer.

Pidge starts to explain, “But we defeated Haggar and we found where your DNA was being kept. Using the specific scripts from your arm, I could isolate the irregular genetic sequence responsible for your—”

“What Pidge is trying to say is that we had to start from scratch, but we got to fix this one before you drove it off the lot,” says Lance. “I’m telling you, was I right or was I right?”

“And look at it this way,” Hunk adds, “You get 50% more arms. Hair came out geriatric white again though. Something to work on for the next time, Allura.”

“There’s not going to be a next time,” Keith says definitively.

He’s sitting closest to Shiro. Actually, Shiro is pretty much using him as a pillow again because he’s too weak to be sitting up on his own power.

Or rather, Keith is holding onto him like he’s afraid he’ll lose him if he lets go. “We almost got here too late. You were nearly gone.”

He looks tired. Skin stretched tight across his face. Pale. Stubble on his chin. There’s dark circles beneath his eyes. Like he hasn’t slept in days.

Shiro doesn’t precisely know how long it’s been, but he knows it’s been a long, long time since he was last awake in this world.

The thought paralyzes him. What has he _done_.

“Is this real? Is this really me?” Shiro asks, fear crawling up his spine. “Am I even real anymore?”

In answer, Keith closes his hands around Shiro’s wrists and pulls them to his chest. Shiro can feel the strength in his grip cuffed securely around the bones. Both arms. His fingers touch Keith’s chest. Warm. Feels its rise and fall. Steady. “Remember how I know you now? I know the real you, Shiro.”

Shiro nods. Swallows. Tries to breathe again. Leans in and presses his forehead against Keith’s and can barely look into his eyes, so close together like this, but he tries anyway because Keith is True North. He’ll always be able to find his way.

“You’re real,” Keith says, cupping his jaw. “This is you. You’re real and I love you.”

It’s not the first time Keith’s said it to him. But it wasn’t really _him_ who heard it.

It’s him who hears it now though. He hears it. This one is for him.

 

_____

 

**Coda:**

“Oh god, that is...that is gross,” Lance mutters, watching Sheith and Keith practically necking. It’s like watching his parents go at it, which is not an image he wants and now he has it, so _thanks_. “Get a room, you two.”

“I think it’s sweet,” Pidge says. “...Hunk, are you crying?”

Hunk makes a noise that sounds suspiciously close to a sob. “I’m not crying! You’re crying!”

“...no, I’m not?”

“There’s no shame in expressing your emotions,” Coran says. “In some cultures, not crying is considered deeply insulting. There are even some plants that will make you cry for _days_ —”

“I think we should give them some privacy,” Allura declares. “Come on!”

There’s a shuffle of feet, more grumbling, and then finally, peace.

 

_____

 

At least until:

“...but really, Shiro, you can totally have them back if you want.”

“Nope. They’re completely yours now. No take backs.”

“Split it fifty-fifty?”

“...I’ll think about it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, come at me, Season 7.


End file.
